Your Right to Know

The Franklin County commissioners will buy one of the few remaining specks of farmland in
Columbus for a new jail and morgue.

The commissioners are expected to approve spending about $1.2 million next week to buy about 23
acres in an industrial district on Fisher Road, just east of I-70 on the West Side. The land,
currently home to a vacant farmhouse and small herd of dairy cows, is owned by Ralph and Chriestena
DeMatteo.

It will be developed into a “public-safety campus,” including the county morgue and toxicology
lab, and a new jail. The commissioners said last year that the need to build both facilities was a
large part of their decision to raise the county’s sales tax by a half-cent per dollar. County
shoppers have been paying that tax since Jan. 1.

Half of that increase is to be put into a fund to help cover about $200 million that county
officials say the new morgue and jail will cost.

Sheriff Zach Scott said yesterday that the location of the new jail was chosen without his
input, and so he declined to comment on the decision.

The county first looked at properties in the county’s land bank, county Administrator Don Brown
said, but none of them was a good fit. They either were in a neighborhood or not the right size, or
would be too costly to redevelop.

The farm field became the county’s first pick, Brown said, because of its ample size, nearby
freeway access, the presence of city utilities and generous zoning. Because it’s undeveloped, the
county won’t have to spend a lot of money on environmental remediation.

The site also is close to the county and city SWAT teams and the Columbus Police Training
Academy on Hague Avenue.

Brown said breaking ground on the facility is still a few years away, and will be preceded by
months of planning and design work.

He said the new jail at first will hold about 800 beds, which means it will replace the county’s
aging Downtown jail but will not fully consolidate all the county’s jail space into one location.
County officials do plan to add to the new jail so that it can handle all county inmates in about a
decade, Brown said.

The new lockup probably will include an arraignment court to cut down on the transportation of
prisoners.

Shannon Sullivan manages the local division of F.P. Supply in Columbus, just east of the
property. He said his family owns the land where the business is located and his first concern upon
learning that a jail would be built next door is what that will do to property values.

Most of the surrounding businesses are industrial or warehouses.

Having a presumably well-lighted jail, with deputy sheriffs coming and going at all hours, would
not necessarily be a bad thing, Sullivan said.

He said it’s not unusual for the company’s work trucks to be burglarized, and he hopes having a
jail next door would help dissuade criminals from loitering.